Embedding Habits II
The second way we can embed habits to help us in the discipleship crisis, is by what we do Sunday by Sunday in our church’s liturgy.
I suspect most of my charismatic friends don’t want to admit that we have a liturgy, as that word is used to describe a different sort of church, but realistically we still have a fairly rigid way of doing things that doesn’t change week-in-week-out. Our order of worship and our running orders are a liturgy. This is true even in churches that have significant portions of the meeting where anyone can contribute (as you should! 1 Corinthians 11-15), there’s still a form to this. That’s good, because order is good (1 Corinthians 14, Genesis 1). Worship should be orderly.
As I’ve argued in the past, we are formed by the just about everything we encounter, but that includes most particularly the worship of the church because we encounter God. The form of our worship embeds habits into the individual bodies present but also into the church as a body.
Which means that if you’re convinced of the discipleship crisis, one of the things you should attend to is the narrative form of our church meetings. What does Sunday look like? What gets included? We might rush to think about our preaching, or maybe our sung worship, but think about all of it, even the notices!
What do we not include that most Christians have? Do we have an argument for that? Because I think we need one if we’re out of step with the tradition. The tradition doesn’t rule us, but it helps us see what sort of burden of proof is required from the Bible: we need a lot of good reasons to not do something that most Christians have done. Of course, the Bible should write our liturgy, but that’s what good brothers in the past were thinking too when they wrote theirs.
I’m a credobaptist, so I’m not afraid to overturn what appears to be the voice of the tradition when I think the Bible teaches otherwise, but we need to do some humbly and with care. Which is a long preamble to address the elephant in the room, why don’t we take the Lord’s Supper every week? I genuinely think it will be an important part of addressing the discipleship crisis, but there are better reasons: the early church did (Acts 2) and the Bible assumes we will too (1 Corinthians 11).
But even if you disagree—and you very much can, you just need a good argument—the broader question remains. Think about what goes into a Sunday as a significant action you take in forming your people. Think about what you experience on a Sunday as something that someone has carefully thought through narratively in order to form you to be more like Jesus. If you aren’t sure how that works, ask your Pastors.
It does mean that if we’re tempted to throw the kitchen sink at a Sunday and include all sorts of things because that’s when we’ve got people, we should stop. I don’t know how common that is, but I know it does happen. Remember what corporate worship is for (hint: worshipping God) and resist the urge to throw in that extra announcement or that little slot for something else. Think carefully about formation instead. It’s not your only way to communicate, but it probably is your only time in the week to engage together in deeply formative worship of the living God.
Of course, if your review of your Sundays makes you think you need to make some liturgical changes to the specific actions, or phrases, that you say every week, I’d caution against changing quickly. People get attached to the way things are—in fact it will have been forming them in a certain direction—and they need them changing carefully, with leadership, and with some explanation. There’s also the risk that you tinker and keep changing it if you change fast; most likely this will have no formative effect at all. A better vision is possible, even if it takes some time to work through.
Eventually you’ll find that people start to think of Jesus as feeding them each week, in word and in bread. That they get a glimpse of a heavenly city that they can then go and live out in their own earthly city. That they learn what a human looks like and how they should live. That we all find ourselves in the house of God, in the heavenly temple, and will be changed by him as we approach and find that he has first stepped towards us in love and gift.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
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